Ben Gilbert: preference

Transcript context

…Well, and Valve’s had such a long history with trying to get into VR but they finally do it right after the Facebook acquisition. So the Kickstarter is hugely successful. They had set an initial goal of $250,000. They end up raising 10 times that. There is almost $2.5 million and then they do something really smart which is after the Kickstarter ends, they basically just continue it on the Oculus website and anybody can go there and order a developer kit for $300. This was like earlier in the crowdfunding era and it’s like amazing to see. You know, if you’re an entrepreneur and you’re trying to just put together around to 250k, like you don’t want to raise 2.4 million because you give up your whole company. But like isn’t crowdfunding great where there’s no equity, so it’s just like money for you to play around with. And sure, you have to fulfill those pre-orders and that’s the biggest issue with Kickstarters, but like what an amazing model to bootstrap a company and get some cash in there long ahead of when you’re going to ship the units. Yeah, totally. And they turn it around pretty quickly but when they put the preorders up on the website after the Kickstarter campaign, there’s so much momentum continuing that they’re selling supposedly for the first couple of days that it’s up on the website, they’re selling four to five developer kits, DK1s as they come to be known. “DK” for developer kit, the first one. At four to five every minute at 300 bucks a pop which is pretty impressive.…

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